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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Im still pretty new to linux and i'm using ubuntu's server 6.06 lts dapper drake distribution to try to figure things out.

upon installing the ssl module for apache, i realized i need to setup virtual host so i can have http and https. i would prefer to have two separate IPs on eth0 rather than installing another NIC, but the manual pages interfaces(5) for the /etc/network/interfaces file is a little over my head.

"The first line of a mapping stanza consists of the word "mapping" followed by a pattern in shell glob syntax. Each mapping stanza must contain a script definition. The named script is run... See /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples of what the script must print."

i checked out a few of those examples, but i guess i didn't really understand what they were saying.

questions:
1) is this a bit over my head, and if so;
2) how do i do it?

Not sure if Ubuntu does it but in Redhat / Fedora distros you use IP Aliasing. You make the other IP eth0:0 and the next eth0:1 and so on. But if you are using iptables for port forwarding then you need to use the IP and not eth0:0 notations. Iptables does not understand IP Aliasing.

every time i try to boot, it hangs at "configuring network interfaces" and sits there indefinitely (a few days justifies 'indefinitely') i realize that this is probably a simple syntax error on my part, but i can no longer boot to fix the problem. i downloaded knoppix to try to edit the file, but it tells me something along the lines of "read only filesystem"...

i'll take suggestions concerning the syntax of the interfaces file and/or ways to boot (with either ubuntu, knoppix, or another alternative) so that i can actually apply those suggestions.

At the main GRUB menu, I highlight the OS I want (Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-26-sever), then press 'e'.
Next, I press 'e' again with "root (hd0,0)" selected, append 'single' to the end of the line, press enter to accept the change. Then press 'b' to boot.

the only problem is that ifconfig reports eth0:0/1 as being inactive. i used ifconfig eth0:0/1 up with no errors and i can ping each ip on the server itself, but other macines time out when trying to ping.

just in case anyone does read this, i finally and completely eliminated the problem by only having eth0 boot at startup.

to automatically setup my virtual interfaces, i created a php-cli script (i didn't want to take the time to learn bash programming) that configures virtual interfaces based on settings in the config file. thenm i created a cron job to run the php script at startup.

may not be the most professional approach, but its gets the job done for me

Another option is to skip the virtual interfaces and just add a second IP to the adapter directly using ip addr add xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xx dev /eth0. ifconfig has been deprecated in kernels after 2.4 in favor of iproute2. I believe the startup issue that you are seeing is that in linux the virtual interfaces are not a true interface, but simply an alias.